Original subtitles

Hi. Here's a beautiful artwork.

Nice, isn't it?

Keep thinking of that.

Now think of something completely different that is still beautiful.

Why is beauty still happening if nothing else is?

Beauty, this vague word, describes a very real effect -

the rush of pleasure you get from beauty.

I'd like to look at this vagueness and see what really goes into it.

So it's not so vague any more.

I think there are laws by which beauty -

this indefinable word - can be defined.

It's true I made them up, but I believe in them

and, in this programme, I will explain what they are.

There's one operating right now and I'll be telling you what it is in a few minutes.

Here's some more beautiful art.

What makes it beautiful?

Is it because faces are beautiful, flowers are, or is it

the way the art has been done?

I'm driving now across another beauty experience, a beautiful bridge.

Its totally modern forms flash by. And whenever I see them,

I ask myself, does beauty and art change over time?

Is beauty always in the eye of the beholder?

These are normal questions that anyone might ask.

I think there ought to be clear answers to them.

What's the main question again?

It's spelled out in capital letters in the title of this programme.

The main problem with defining beauty in art is having something definite to point to.

So I've picked out 10 different art works from all over the world

and different points in history and, over the next hour,

I'm going to look at them with you. I'm going to salute

the particular kind of beauty that each different one has, celebrate it and enjoy it

and I'm going to try and say what it is that, for me,

in each case, is making that particular beauty happen.

This is the first one. It's a bridge.

The Millau Viaduct in southern France.

Designed by the British architect Norman Foster.

I've been over it many times.

You could say it's just a useful tool for getting from A to B.

It's a motorway, basically. I say it's an inspiring object.

It's beautiful.

It has the kind of beauty that I think goes into art.

To me, this stands for awe at nature,

not just nature, but real, powerful staggering awe.

So I'm proposing that nature and the way art

always returns to nature is one big principle behind beauty in art.

Nature. One way or another, nature's awesome presence gets repackaged in art.

The way it's happening here is a very modern experience of nature.

This is not a Victorian suspension bridge, where you feel the heaviness and the mass. It's delicate.

It can almost disappear in the glinting light of the valley.

Those white pyramid shapes are like cartoon mountain shapes.

A computer-generated engineering feat,

where 240,000 tons of concrete and steel can seem lightweight.

And driving across it can feel like you're flying.

The style of the bridge is minimalism. Less is more.

There's always been this mood in art, in all periods.

A sense of something honed down.

A quietness, a calm, stripped back, pared down, a visual essence.

A kind of minimalism is there in art from 1,000 years ago,

where nature is represented as so many clearly readable signs.

The world, trees, plants, people.

The forms are purified. It's a kind of religious minimalism.

Anything superfluous to the religious message is stripped away.

But that stripping down produces strong shapes

which have their own stripped down duty beauty.

You step into a modern art gallery and beauty is very different.

You might think it isn't there at all, and nature isn't either.

But hang on, nature's structures are there.

Light gleaming, surfaces reflecting,

the feeling of space, the experience of nature is honed down

by that kind of art into a single, abstract effect.

The bridge is in that stripped-down tradition.

It's modern, but it answers a timeless yearning.

From the distance, on a cloudy day, with the thunder rumbling, it almost seems part of nature.

Like a tree springing out of the ground,

each of those columns is integrated with nature.

As well as being in it, it does something to it - it makes you re-see it.

It tells you about the hugeness and light of the span of that valley.

It tells you how beyond belief the valley is.

Here's a structure in nature - a valley.

Here's a valley shape in abstract art by Morris Louis

Van Gogh shows a tangled structure in a painting of almond blossoms

Then there's a tangled structure in an abstract painting by Jackson Pollock.

From the bridge, the world looms out.

Nature sending out its message.

We're hard-wired as a species to respond to it.

We make beautiful art full of it.

We probably couldn't stop if we tried.

The next principle of beauty in art requires a change of gear.

From art about nature... to art about people.

In about 1455, in a town called Monterchi near Florence in Italy,

an artist paints a pregnant Madonna.

The artist's mother was born here so it has a personal meaning for him.

The mother of the artist and Mary, the Mother of Christ.

But the principle behind this painting's beauty, for me,

is much simpler than that. In fact, it's simplicity itself.

Simplicity - the soul getting refreshed from

everything suddenly getting a bit uncluttered and calmed down.

It's very unusual for a Renaissance Madonna to be pictured actually pregnant.

It was considered a bit too physical for such a celestial being.

What is particularly touching here is how believable pregnancy is.

It's a warmly human picture.

But not just that. Its simplicity is stark and burning as well.

The most important event in the world is on the way.

I like the weirdness of the place it's presented in.

Contrasting with its beautiful countryside surroundings,

here it's all drabness, as if nothing's happening.

A plain municipal building.

You wouldn't expect to find beautiful art here.

You might expect to find a meeting of local councillors.

Instead, there's a beautiful Renaissance altarpiece

by Piero della Francesca, done originally for a chapel in the town.

All Piero's paintings were done in this same region, the border of Tuscany and Umbria,

where the landscape is still recognisable from the backgrounds of many of them.

The same eye, tuned to the pleasure of a beautiful landscape

that never changes, orders shapes in a painting

so they, too, seem timeless.

A tent seen head-on,

its opening exactly in the middle of the picture.

A simple, symmetrical opposition.

A woman with a beautiful, youthful face simply delineated.

The woman exactly in the middle of the picture.

Two shapes exactly the same, but reversed,

the angels holding the tent flaps open, the colours exactly balanced.

All their halos make accents in the top part of the picture,

matching their feet in the bottom part.

Those same colours but reversed.

What simplicity in art is for is elegance of communication,

so whatever complexity the art has can come across beautifully.

All these tweaks of difference are a foil to the overall simplicity

to draw your attention to it, making you see simplicity even more.

A pregnant woman in a tent, the openings furled up,

as if the whole space of the tent is a womb -

the creation of life going on inside.

All art strives to simplify

and geometric arrangement is a way of doing that.

Piero is very symmetrical.

When another Renaissance artist, Bellini,

does geometry 50 years later, he's very triangular.

A lot of blue triangles.

One big triangle.

Blue triangle in a horizontal expanse.

In our era, modern art attacks.

Blue triangle in a black rectangle by Malevich in 1915.

The old gets blasted away. But actually,

it's the old's pure geometry that the new is very interested in.

I really like the way that Renaissance geometric shapes

become a visual tradition for future artists to draw on.

I think the conventional way of depicting light in art is something like that.

Like anyone else, my mood is always affected by light.

I think, in art, the meaning of the effect changes over time

because society changes.

So the emotion serves a different purpose.

An Inner Glow, by Rothko in the 1950s,

might be fear of the bomb, or the unconscious.

It's a disturbing glow.

A glow in a seascape by Claude Lorrain is

the glow of an imagined golden age of the past.

The glow of nostalgia.

A point of light radiating outwards in a Turner is

the romantic inner turbulence that people of the age of Romanticism

thought was expressed in turbulent nature.

Radiating light in a Tintoretto from the age of the renaissance is

the light of Christian redemption, the spirit of Jesus.

I am the Light.

The way the light is painted is beautiful in the same way

in all the pictures, but the meaning changes.

A church bell rings out in Cicely in the town of Monreale,

where the next beautiful art experience is at.

When we get in there, don't think and I won't talk.

Just enjoy a satisfying, luxurious visual effect.

These are mosaics in a Norman church, built in the 12th century.

Work began in 1174.

The mosaics took 10 years to complete.

There are many things that are beautiful about them.

The building is a giant light-box. It throws light around.

The natural, streaming, white light coming in through the high windows

which reflects off the gold, marble and glass mosaic pictures -

reflects unevenly, so the scenes seem to glint and to shimmer.

But the principle that I would say makes it all work

is the principle of unity.

Unity. Many different things organised so that,

no matter how complicated each one is, they all seem to fit together as part of one thing.

This is unity in action.

6,000 square metres of flowing visual energy,

flowing towards the super being

pictured at the top of the apse of the church,

that whole golden wall at the end of the nave.

And flowing out again to everything else.

I love the overwhelming feeling of it all.

But I also love the physical basis of all that transcendence,

the way it's done using very specific materials.

Here's a handful of mosaic tesserae -

covered marble and glass and bits of gold leaf set within clear glass.

Different, uneven little cubes - that's what a mosaic is made of.

A mosaic artist works in a particular way.

They put together bits deliberately unevenly but so there's

a visual rightness in relation from one bit to another.

It's a rightness that the artist feels, so that each bit

stands for a decision taken about an overall visual unity.

And that visual sense continues in the big shapes and patterns

of the mosaic picture system in the church.

The same kind of rhythm runs through everything -

the pictures and the place the pictures are in.

One picture's forms echo and repeat another picture's forms.

And all their forms echo and repeat the forms of the architecture.

This art was for a society that had certain ruling ideas.

They were society's conception of itself,

ideas about how reality is ordered.

The unity principle of the art connects to that idea of reality.

Everyone has their place and the way people are positioned in society

is reflected by beautiful art -

a hierarchy of the greater and the lesser.

The greatest is so great, one of his fingers is a metre long.

A symbolic Christ tells us about unity.

The human and the divine are unified in his person.

The hand gesture - the last two fingers making a circle with the thumb

and the first two fingers separated from the others - is a symbol for that.

The human, the divine are unified, the circle.

Bless you all.

Now for a crazy rumbling sound.

LOW GUTTURAL TONE

For 50,000 years,

Stone Age man painted animals on the walls of caves.

The style never changed much

and that incredibly long-lasting style is what I'm celebrating now.

For me, the magic of the beauty of cave art

is in the transformation of dirty little piles of coloured pigment

into a magic illusion of the artist's living reality.

Transformation.

The world. My head.

Get that stuff in here in a form that makes sense.

Maybe art is the way to go.

That's a caveman thinking.

But it's also any artist thinking at any time.

The way transformation works in cave art

is that something real out there in the world

is transformed into something symbolic here in the cave.

Cave art isn't about beautifying the habitat.

The cave artists didn't live in the caves,

they lived in huts made of mud and bone.

They only painted here, far from any natural light.

No-one could live here.

Let's get in there and get out again.

These are two life-sized horses

in the Peche Merle cave in the Dordogne in France.

The spots and handprints are magic symbols.

They didn't paint everywhere in the cave, only special parts of it,

where magic rituals had gone on for thousands of years.

Here's another magic spot at Peche Merle, fragments of animals.

Like modern art, the black line has a life of its own.

It suggests lots of things at once - movement, speed, shape,

and the shape broken up, as if you're seeing a lot of glimpses.

And the parts suggest a whole, but the whole is never quite there.

A simple mark on a rough surface.

From those elements alone you feel you're out there,

or what's out there is in here.

The magic of cave art has a very definite purpose.

The aim is to hunt and kill animals.

They're in the cave, thoughtful, in the dark,

within themselves, soulful.

Outside it's a hostile environment - they're always fighting the animals.

In the dark they use artistic skills to make the cave soulful.

The animals are much bigger than them.

They see a natural rock formation

that looks like the profile of a horse.

They paint a little horse's head in there.

Now THEY'RE calling the shots.

Art is always about transformation in some way.

The Dutch artist Aelbert Cuyp paints animals in the 17th century.

This is much more like our idea of art than a cave artist's idea.

But both types of artist are not just capturing a scene.

They're doing it in such a way

that the scene is transformed into the symbolic universe of the artist.

Nice animals.

Psychic animals.

But they're both psychic, really, in that, in each case,

the beauty stands for all sorts of ideas.

Cuyp paints cows in a field.

They're really there to frame a landscape

full of poetic evening light.

We feel filled up with peaceful calm.

We're responding to the painted image in our own way.

A Stone Age artist paints magic bulls hurtling through space -

his audience responds to the painted image in THEIR own way.

They cast spells on it and worship it and throw spears at it.

It's not that the animals were beautiful and so the cavemen naturally wanted to paint them.

Painting the animals was a psychic operation by which the cavemen

imbued the animals with a powerful force that they wanted to absorb.

They didn't look at art like we do,

looking at something very distanced from ourselves,

finding it nice, making judgements about it

and forgetting about it until we next go to a gallery.

When they painted they were performing something,

manifesting through pictures

a force they found powerful so that they could absorb it,

so that they could control it.

And the magic element required for this big transformation was beauty.

They do the performance, they look at it.

What they see, we find beautiful.

What they get from it is recognition

that the transformation has happened.

After the magic ritual they crawled out of the cave darkness,

blinking in the light.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space.

Where am I?

Spatial grandiosity, sheer white,

beautifully finished, polished, dusky blondewood floors.

The features finished to inhuman perfection.

Humans present but not human clutter.

The feeling of an army of cleaners with PhDs in dusting.

It's the contemporary art gallery experience.

New contemporary art galleries

are going up all the time all over the world.

This is the latest one. The Brandhorst Museum in Munich.

Built in 2009, its streamlined spaces demonstrate,

as all such spaces do, the priority of the particular stuff

that the contemporary art-gallery experience relies on, which is...

The surroundings.

Not the art but the stuff that surrounds it is where the beauty is.

I always think it's funny that contemporary art is shown against

a backdrop of pure white,

like the humble cell of a monk,

as if it really does have something religious to offer

but at the same time it's such a vast cell,

such a huge, amplified, expensive whiteness,

it's as if the cell has something to, well, sell.

How do you get your head round what's really going on now

after all those centuries of greatness in art?

Many people don't expect contemporary art to be about beauty

but we're still human, and a hunger for beauty is part of what makes us human,

like our tendency to be religious.

The contemporary art cult is full of the voodoo mysticism of religion.

But it lets the cult members off religion's other traditional task,

of providing rich, encompassing wisdom.

It comes up with mental conundrums instead.

Just as religion lingers on in art

when it's no longer at the centre of social life,

so beauty lingers on in contemporary art

when contemporary art is perfectly fine about being ugly or nondescript

or just visually arbitrary.

It's in the beautiful surroundings of contemporary art

that the human appetite for beauty is satisfied.

The wow effect. "Wow," you think, "all this space just for me."

This has become the familiar atmosphere of art.

For ages the natural atmosphere was incense and hymns

and people wearing robes,

because the place for art was the church,

where art radiated religious wisdom.

The art was beautiful and its beauty was visually integrated

with the architecture of the building.

Now there's a sacred atmosphere, but everything else is different.

Today no-one insists that artists

better make their art objects be beautiful.

They can be. A bit.

Or they needn't be.

And they might connect to the building. Or they don't have to.

The objects don't have to radiate anything, because the surroundings

are doing all the radiating considered necessary.

With the magic rituals of the cavemen, art specials up the space.

With contemporary art, the space specials up the art.

The principles of beauty in art build up.

Now beauty in this programme is going to reach crescendo point,

as once again I return to the distant past,

and the mighty achievements of art history present themselves.

Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling,

a beauty experience I couldn't possibly leave out.

How can man get back to paradise?

That's pretty much the story.

But in terms of beauty the thing I think still makes an impact,

when you take away everything you can look

up in books, is the amazing distorted almost flowing animation

of what you're seeing.

It's such a strong effect that, for me,

this is actually a great principle of beauty.

Animation.

Think of a scene, anything.

It's a bit flat.

Then there's a blast of animating power,

and it's as if life has been breathed into the situation.

With modern art, it's the energy that explodes geometric shapes.

They're obviously not real, but they seem incredibly lively.

With Michelangelo, the liveliness is in the energy that animates -

tremendous knees, frowns, foreheads, hair like the turbulent sea.

Twisting, writhing, muscular movement.

They're not real either,

any more than modern art abstract brush strokes are real.

They're idealisations of some strange notion of the godliness

of the human that Michelangelo had in his head from when he was young.

A good perspective from which to get

what Michelangelo's explosiveness is about, is not 60 feet below the

ceiling, where everybody usually has to stand to see it,

but 200 miles away in these beautiful classical

shadows, where, as a teenager,

Michelangelo was taught ultimate meaning by humanist scholars,

here at the San Marco Convent in Florence.

From his lessons he absorbed ideas about all sorts

different types of erotic and spiritual love,

the place of God and the place of man, and the amazing civilisations

of the lost past and the art they left behind.

All that simmered in Michelangelo's brain

all through his rise to fame as a great artist,

until he got the Sistine Chapel commission,

the first time he could paint whatever he wanted.

Michelangelo had a mind educated to think in an epic way, compressing

time, the past, the present and future all happening at once,

elevating all moods to utter seriousness, ultimate destiny,

man spiritually united with God.

Constant inner struggle - how can I be good, the best?

How can I be right, the rightest?

Michelangelo gets the gods of the past, represented in old sculptures,

and makes them into the Old Testament

with his new painting style.

A new way of making people stare with fascination

at their own humanity.

Animation - not like in our time in the movies in the service of fun.

Instead, in the service of heavy meaning - what are we?

We're all gonna die.

He does something that doesn't fit the frame - he has to somehow

put the feeling in, the conventional Christian message of reassurance.

It bursts beyond that. He's got his own message, a new kind of physical

form, deformed, not so it's horrible, but not reassuring either.

As jarring for the culture of the Renaissance

and just as hair-raising for us.

In fact, you see a man's hair flowing forwards with the force

of the rush of some kind of wind, as he's thrown violently backwards.

Nothing's actually throwing him anywhere.

It's some kind of inner spirit to the whole painting.

The force of animated energy that, for me,

beautiful art always in some way has.

And yet here's somebody who tones it right down.

Magritte, the great master of the look of the utterly plain.

Here he is unexpectedly on the beauty list.

What I think about this famous surrealist is that, by a series

of steps, he checkmates you into finding

the utterly plain beautiful. That makes him modern.

And the principle that drives these moves is the principle of surprise.

Surprise - art jolts you out of old ways of seeing,

so you don't see the same thing all the time.

Magritte skips the natural and plugs straight into

a sort of hidden wiring in the mind, the unconscious.

So reality is represented by a system of signs,

only they're completely unreliable.

Once a look in art gets established,

it's always capable of being impressive.

You can always find Michelangelo beautiful,

even though, over time, beauty in art changes.

Time, shapes, symbols, space - all these are different for us.

That's why modern art happened.

Beauty in art always has to have an element of surprise.

You have to re-see the known so it can be known differently.

Art attacks habit.

Man dreams.

Dreams of ordinary things.

A hat, a mirror, a bow, a pigeon, a candle, an apple.

They're only signs for things.

But then, he's only a sign for a man.

Blimey - philosophy!

Where do you begin and where do you end?

I think you begin with beauty.

You end with surprise!

Surprises in art are bad when they're shallow.

When they're good it's because they tell you something true.

When Magritte painted the words, "This is not a pipe", under a

painting of one, it was true because it's not a pipe - it's a painting.

Magritte painted "The Reckless Sleeper" in 1928.

It's not of someone, or something that necessarily happened.

It is only itself.

It sets up meanings using simple signs for objects.

But because Magritte is so baffling about meaning,

a thing he keeps setting up but never deliberately follows through,

you are returned

to the one thing he doesn't seem to be interested in at all,

which is beauty.

And you see how very serious about it he is.

For me, that hat is a beautiful hat.

I see it as one of several things that Magritte beautifully

interweaves in this painting.

The grey blues of the hat, bow and pigeon,

and the grey yellows of the candle, apple and mirror.

They're part of a whole beautiful pattern of repeats and variations.

The contour of that strange grey blob below, echoed

by the contour of the blob-shaped simplified red blanket above.

You've got the beauty and the attitude of the beauty,

and it's in that that

Magritte is more surprising than other great geniuses of the modern.

In fact, to me he seems actually more modern than them.

When Picasso shows you something ruptured and fractured and

abstracted, he's rocking tradition - he's saying,

"You can't just go on obeying tradition."

But actually, compared to Magritte, he's still quite traditional.

He's saying, "Here's a thing.

"Real women in a real room, dancing."

It's just that you're seeing it differently.

The painting is beautiful in a savage way,

and it's a bit conceptual.

All those rough textures and strong colours are

all ultimately in the service of a surprise that delights you.

But with Magritte, you can't even be sure that it is a thing.

It's beautiful in a jokey way.

It seems to be all conceptual.

But ultimately it is a painting. It's visual.

It's just that all those perfect relationships

are all in the service of a surprise that unhinges you.

Wow! Where are we at now?

All sorts of principles but gradually a sense of the essential

timeless nature of them,

which is the reason I keep messing with time in this programme.

Here's a principle of beauty that is so constant in art, that

probably most people take it so much for granted,

they don't realise they're seeing it.

Even an artist as odd as Magritte does it.

Pattern.

A way of organising visual experience so it looks nice.

Mosaics again. But mosaics used to be what painting eventually became, the main visual language of art.

And I'm looking at mosaics now in this museum in Tunis,

to focus on the oldest, most basic element of beauty in art.

What is this? It's a work of art from the 4th century AD.

A Roman mosaic from a townhouse in North Africa.

The Romans ruled this area during the first four centuries AD.

This museum is full of their mosaics, picturing the good life.

What you're seeing is all the floors of a single house tipped up to make a multi-part wall mosaic.

Right at the top, in what would have been the biggest room, is the god Oceanus, a patterned face,

the coloured mosaic stones rhythmically flowing.

Around him, a halo, a geometric patterned version of a glow of light.

Underneath him, a flowing pattern of little love creatures, his children.

And underneath them,

more of Oceanus' offspring, nymphs

and gods made of patterns, surrounded by an emptiness

that's always patterned, so isn't really empty at all.

Different types of pattern everywhere.

Birds in a grid pattern.

The birds have riders, more offspring of Oceanus.

Winged, flying love gods - the Erotes.

They're riding on birds for extra wing power.

Patterns are found in real things, so they make sense visually as a kind of abstracting.

The curve of a fishing line, the curve of a boat, the curve of an abstract border.

A mosaic is always patterned simply because of the modular nature of the medium.

As soon as you put a few mosaic squares together, a pattern forms.

The pattern possibilities are endless.

All this is not just a dusty history lesson with Latin words.

The mosaics express the world around, the people the mosaics were made for.

Nature's appearance, that's what the patterns spring from.

Abstract design and the realistic world, they bounce off each other and feed each other ideas.

We think abstract art only exists in our time to annoy us.

But all art is abstract really.

And all abstraction comes from the look of the world at any time.

A pattern made of trailing vines.

A pattern made of abstract marks.

The eye gets pleasure from the beauty in both of them.

Visual effects in art, abstract values, organising and arranging

visual elements so the arrangement looks nice.

The same approaches to this problem in art come back all the time.

Fish in rows by Romans,

fish in rows by Damien Hirst.

Winged love gods by Romans, pulsing in a grid pattern.

Abstract spots of colour by Damien Hirst, doing the same thing.

If I analyse how I'm looking at this,

I find I'm breaking it up into different configurations.

Picking out one set of colours, then another,

so I'm seeing a grid pattern re-making itself endlessly.

The dots on their own are nothing much.

The overall buzzing grid effect is good, like nature is good.

With all these patterns,

the pleasure that they give to the eye

is a metaphor for the pleasure in life that the picture is about. Nature.

Art offers nature in a pattern or a structure

because nature is patterned and structured in the first place.

Art from the 1950s.

A light bulb blinking.

Torn up newspaper.

Paint dripping.

This might seem like random rubbish stuck on a canvas.

But I think it's got the beauty of any beautiful painting from history, and this is the reason why.

Selection. An artist selects something and not something else.

It's a painting by Robert Rauschenberg from 1954.

It's made of bits and pieces lying around that he's picked up.

Red wood, red paint, red fabric.

A gauze umbrella, some parts of which he's painted red.

He's gonna bounce all that with green and white and yellow.

Some of it is personal.

A letter from his mother that he stuck on, in which

his mother tells him that his sister has just been made into a beauty queen.

His own un-beautiful vest.

But most of it is random, and the impression

of randomness is important to the energy.

Stuff just lying around doesn't have energy.

It's the particular stuff that Rauschenberg has picked

and the way that he's placed it,

so randomness is no longer randomness, but freshness.

The way that he does it is not by piling on chaos,

but by having an eye

interested in selecting one thing instead of another.

At age 24, a beatnik in New York,

Robert Rauschenberg is lost in space.

Working fast in a frenzy, but also emotionally a little bit zoned out,

not really caring about the personal nature of the stuff

he's chucking in, and caring more about its texture

and colour, and how they answer other textures and colours.

He selects the junk that will work with the junk already selected.

A yellow light bulb, the gloopy, distorted shape of a reflection on a bit of old mirror.

They connect visually.

The yellow drip, the yellow bulb.

They connect. Some junk is smeared, some junk is compartmentalised.

Some junk here, some junk there.

It's rubbish talking to rubbish visually.

A compartmentalised look is very ancient visual tradition in art.

The Romans did that kind of thing. They stuck gods and other things they liked inside rectangles.

With Rauschenberg, it's a letter and his vest.

Because it's rubbish and not gods, because there's only a very fine difference

between his art and mere randomness,

Rauschenberg draws your attention even more to the selection principle.

Rauschenberg is faced with everything, just to cut it down to something.

So he finds relationships, he finds a spring and a tension between elements.

I think this painting has as much beauty as anything in Medieval art of Renaissance art.

But it's not the same beauty, because it isn't answering the same society's understanding of reality.

We don't have the same sense of hierarchies.

We don't all necessarily have God.

We're open-minded about the difference between the random and the important.

The painting is called Charlene. That's the name of a dancer he knew.

He was friendly with a modern dance company.

Now, that information really is random, the title doesn't do anything.

The selection does it.

This isn't random.

This is beauty.

We're near the end of the Beauty programme

and we still haven't heard about the commonest and most delightful kind of beauty of all,

the ordinary beauty of a beautiful face.

You see one, there's a rush of feeling, like the rush of pleasure from beautiful art.

There's something spontaneous about it, which is my last principle behind beauty in art.

Spontaneity.

Don't be how everybody else wants you to be, be yourself.

Be spontaneous.

Here are some beautiful faces in real life, in Paris, at a street party.

Here's a beautiful place in a painting by Gauguin, in a museum.

These are real, this one is idealised.

These are happy and animated, the party is going on, men are meeting women, love is in the air.

Here, green is in the air and red and yellow and orange and blue.

The path is red and the dog is orange.

For Gauguin, living and working in Paris in the late 19th century, the West was corrupt.

So Gauguin left the bad West, and went round the other side of the world, to the South Sea Islands,

where he spent his last years, painting scenes like this,

man's eternal striving to return to Paradise.

The ideal that Michelangelo attempted to depict in Renaissance art.

Only here, it's the early stages of Modern Art and the Paradise is a real place you can actually go to.

The title is a Tahitian word for joy or joyousness.

He painted it in 1892.

He had ten years to live.

He lived in an incredibly squalid situation, full of filth,

poverty and oppression of the natives by the French authorities.

Gauguin himself partly wanted to free the natives to be themselves

and partly wanted to exploit them, taking the younger ones as lovers.

When he died, he was covered in sores, his leg was suppurating, he had eczema and syphilis.

His body lay in a mess of filth and hypodermic syringes.

He used morphine to kill the pain of his real existence.

While in his paintings, he put together scenes of a paradise on Earth.

It might seem at first to be a straightforward sexy paradise where everyone dances around totem poles

and acts spontaneously and pouts at you when they're playing the flute.

But it's not a pre-camera snapshot of a South Sea Island scene, it's an idealisation.

Gauguin made it up and what went into it was a series of decisions

about colour and materials and each one was a jump into the unknown.

He doesn't just fill in shapes, he doesn't get inspired colour combinations

from a colour matching chart, he improvises them,

spontaneously and those improvisations make up the personality of the painting.

Gauguin pushes paint around until the picture

seems to be going in a good direction and when he finally gets there,

he's not at all sure what it is.

I look at the woman. She's a cartoon, really.

She's not of that much interest. I look at the painting as a whole, I see that the colour is powerful -

those contrasts and harmonies of colour.

At the time, they seemed jarring to Gauguin's audience.

It didn't seem like art at all.

But we've come to see that kind of colour as a way of making

art beautiful and we appreciate Gauguin for that colour.

So it's the beauty of the painting as a whole that makes the woman beautiful, not the other way round.

To me, that painting isn't really a picture of a land where it's better to live than France,

but a concentrated expression of beauty, the real purpose of which

is to make anyone feel life is worth living wherever you are.

Gauguin's colour patches are part of the beginning of modern art

so he will be there in the abstract squares that are about to appear.

50 years after Gauguin's death, Matisse experiments with spontaneity.

His painted sheets of paper and their torn edges are his version of Gauguin's spontaneity.

His version of nature is there, too.

It is called The Snail.

The circularity from the centre outwards suggests the well-known form of that animal's shell.

Into the whirling vortex of Matisse's wonky squares,

time compresses, the past and the present join up

and I can now answer the question I raised at the beginning of this programme:

"Is art beautiful because of what it's of or because of how it's done?"

My answer is both.

Society changes, so over time, what it's considered important to make pictures of changes.

It might be supernatural beings or it might be abstract shapes.

It might be idealised people whose perfection suggests a cosmic order, or it might be

idealised versions of nature done with a freshness

that suggests a sort of wondrous illumination about life.

But whatever it is, it reflects what we think we are, what we think reality is.

When we find art beautiful, we're seeing what we want to see, what we're interested in.

We don't realise there are actually reasons for the beauty,

visual traditions that have built up over ages.

They are based on observation of what's all around us all the time.

And they make the artistic reflection of our changed selves

not just recognisable, but powerfully, richly recognisable.

They make the reflection beautiful.

Matisse's collage is a natural, organic form, a spiral...

done with unnatural shapes, straight lines and hard edges.

There aren't any straight lines in nature, but Matisse makes you re-see organic form

by creating it in an unexpected way, just like all the artists

in this programme have been doing, riffs on nature and artifice.

Well, that's the end of this personal top ten beautiful things.

You might be thinking that Matisse should have had his own place on it

instead of just a brief mention when the list was over but, after all,

the list is potentially endless because anyone can make their own.

You can start making your own right now and put him on it.

Goodbye.

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